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Elena, just now [watching The Little Mermaid]: Where are Ariel's parents?
Me: Well, they just showed her father. He's looking for her.
E: But where's her mom?
Me: *eyeroll* Good question.
galagan: Yeah, we never get to find that out, do we?
E: Maybe she's at work?
galagan: Could be....
E: Yeah, she's definitely at work.

(Way to go, sweetie! Glad to see that feminist consciousness is developing already at age 4! We must be doing something right!)

The other day, Elena was flipping through her favorite books about the planets, and said "Mom, dwarf means small, right?" Some time later, she commented, "Next year, when Pluto grows up, it will be a REAL planet." I engaged in a brief discussion with her about how planets don't really grow that way, and so I didn't think.... but she was completely uninterested in my point, so I dropped it.

*********************************************

Nice weekend. Friday, galagan had the day off (because the markets were closed) and Elena went to school, so the two of us got to hang out all morning, no pressure and no kid..... It was very nice. Then he took off to play poker, and I pretended to do school work all afternoon. (ha!) Saturday, I got up and went to work, which was workish, and then came home and read my book while galagan slept off that poker binge. Last night we went to kassrachel's seder, with samtheeagle in tow, and it was lovely and low-key and yummy. Parsley, horseradish, charoset..... these things make me happy. We came home and put E to bed very late and then stayed up extra late talking with Sam himself. Got up this morning, gave Elena some chocolate, went to breakfast with Sam, and then waved goodbye to him. Since then, we've just had a quiet lazy Sunday - I've done a little school work, and there's reading and snacks. And leftovers for dinner. :)

Life is good today.

As of this morning, Elena will be starting to go to pre-school 3 days a week next week! I'd been wanting this increase for a little while, chiefly for school purposes - but it also opens up the possibility of occasional free time (like, it might get to exist) for me. She loves school so much, and we knew we wanted to increase the number of days eventually. Woo!! One of her friends starts on Monday (in the class below hers) - so that will be nice too: she'll be there to cheer on O at his first day.

.... *ahem* I'm distracted for a moment, because there seems to be a huge convention of female cardinals outside the window. There must be at least 30 of them. How bizarre.

Spring!

I think my classes are going to be survivable this quarter. We'll See.

Work stuff is good too. The director and the children's librarian will be retiring this summer, and people are moving up, etc. They asked me if I would be interested in the mid-level positions opening up. (Yes.) And yesterday, I arrived for story hour just in time to hear the future Acting Director tell the current children's staff that he's been hearing wonderful things about me and my work there. Woo!

Tonight Elena is going over to Cassie's house for the evening and we have a night out! on! the! town! Woohoo indeed.

ETA: In other good news - go Iowa!!!! :)

I haven't written much lately..... some combination of too-busy and not-enough-going-on. :) My dad is here visiting now, and I tend not to spend as much time noodling around LJ while he's around. We went to MassMOCA yesterday (the Sol Lewitt exhibit is *amazing*!!!! It makes me very happy to realize that I have 24.5 more years to visit it and look many many more times), and today went to the local history museum that tells all about trains and train tunnels...... I like that stuff (well, the local history part, anway) and so does he, but Elena was not putting up with it at ALL, unfortunately, and kept yanking on my hand. "Can we go now, mommy? can we go? can we goooooooooo?"

Dad leaves tomorrow, as does galagan who is going to Phoenix for a few days of the annual spring break / spring training trip. I'm skipping the trip this year, which is fine...... Our weather is supposed to warm up in the next few days anyway, though perhaps not to Phoenix levels. :) So Elena and I will have several days to ourselves to play. These are the last days of my spring vacation from classes too - so I'm just going to read and cook and quilt/knit/fiddle with bits of yarn and fabric and stuff......'

My third quarter of classes starts next week. One dreadful required class that is some combination of business and technical services - oh goodie! two things I know *nothing* about!!! (and really don't care to, much) - and the other about public libraries, which looks fairly decent.

At some point I need to compose a big progress report post for Elena - this is what she's doing and saying and whatnot these days. But that day is not today.

We picked my mom up yesterday in Albany, and had dinner at a random Indian restaurant in Albany (Royal India on Central Avenue - two big thumbs up!). Elena was perfectly behaved, and the waiters were so charmed by her that they gave her free dessert. (I think they don't see little kids in there much.) So she's redeemed herself - that's more what we're used to.

My mother took my car and drove down to take the train into New York to hear my sister give a recital tonight. She'll be coming back home tomorrow..... in the 5-12 inches of snow we're suddenly supposed to be getting. Oooops. Well, she lives in Montana and knows how to drive in snow. Hopefully everything will be okay.

galagan went to New Hampshire to play poker today, so I'm on my own with Elena. I sent out an email about Elena's birthday party and I paid my tuition for next quarter, but I haven't done as much homework as I'd hoped. I also had some girly bonding with Elena. All in all, a good productive day.

When I look at my recent entries, I realize that I haven't made a Real Post in like forEVAR. So I think I'll try - but it may end up being a random laundry list.

* School is good. This has been an unexpectedly easy quarter, which is lovely and nice. I am surviving Stats, and maybe even understand some of it. (I have an AWESOME prof - that helps.) And the quarter is almost done. Dang, quarters go fast...... In 3 weeks I will be 1/4 of the way through the entire degree!

* Work is good. I like my crappy, low-paying job, and that's a nice realization. And someday, the economy will shift and there will once again be job openings, and I can hope to move on from this to something bigger and more challenging. All in good time (I hope).

* Elena is about to turn 4. 4!! Yes, I know. She is roughly 8 feet tall and talks a blue streak when she gets going...... We had a playdate this morning and I can tell she really likes this particular mom, because she talks about her (as opposed to talking about her child) before they even showed up, and once they got here, she would not shut up! She kept bringing books and toys to K to show off to her.

She was poking through our DVDs last week, and pulled out The Little Mermaid. (Yes, I own it. Shut up.) She was instantly drawn to it, and has watched it every day since. (Actually - she's only allowed to watch it once a day, and we've gotten it so that she watches half of the movie per day - that's 45 minutes, and about as long as her attention span will really go.) This is her first movie obsession (in that toddler way of watching the same movie over and over and over and over) - and it's not THAT bad. She has absolutely no problems with Ursula the Sea Witch. (Let me point out that she won't watch Sesame Street anymore - though she loves it - because she's afraid of Cookie Monster, despite my repeated statements that he's a very nice monster who just gets a little excited sometimes...... But Ursula is no problem? Sheesh.)

So let's add mermaids to the obsession list of princesses and ballerinas.

She's always telling me about her sisters (usually represented by dolls). Sometimes they get time-outs for no apparent reason. It's always a little horrifying to watch her parody of parental discipline and wonder if that's how we appear to her.

She is completely madly utterly head-over-heels in love with me right now. She's so affectionate too, which means she'll launch herself at me for a full body hug and lots of kisses. If she knocks me over, so much the better. This also means, in the balancing scale which is parenting, that she's totally not into Daddy right now. This is okay - he knows how it goes, and that eventually it will shift back again. But this did lead to an amusing conversation yesterday when I left for rehearsal:

Me: I'm going - now you be nice to Daddy, okay?
Her: Okay. I won't push him.
[pause]
Me: Okay, don't yell at him either.

I need to plan a birthday party for her..... My mom will be here all next week (leading up to E's birthday), so that will be help on some fronts, and also more work entertaining the house guest, etc. etc.

* I have read so many good books in the last month or so! Some of the recent favorites: Graceling, Feed, Fires of the Faithful, Uglies (!!!!!!), the Sharing Knife series, the Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Spiral Hunt, Rapunzel's Revenge. Mmmmm, good stuff.

Okay, my week has finally turned around. :)

* I had two concerts this weekend, and they are now over! (There was nothing wrong with them, I just wasn't in the mood, and this wasn't my favorite music ever. Except 2 short songs by Holst, and that's not enough to propel me happily forward, apparently.)

* Yesterday, we bought a new dining room table! Just like that! I am given to understand that normal people go shopping and sometimes spend money, but we usually have to agonize over purchases for MONTHS before we allow ourselves to spend. We ventured out to a couple of antique stores in Pittsfield, and at the second one, we saw a gorgeous gorgeous table, and I think we both fell a little in love on first sight. And the price was so so so much lower than what one would pay for a new table!!!!! So. We'll get it Tuesday. And then we need to get new chairs too. Now we can actually have people over and have somewhere to seat them! We can reciprocate for all those people who have had us over for dinner! \O/

* An actual Girl Scout came to my door this afternoon selling cookies. Need I say more? No more having to hope that I will stumble upon them hawking cookies at the grocery store or the mall! \O/

* For those of you not following galagan's status updates on Facebook - we just got Rock Band 2. I can sing, no problem, but I suck at the instruments. (Even on Easy - I'm sort of pathetic.) Yay, what fun! \O/

* My daughter is absolutely hilarious. If this is a preview of what 4-years-old will be like, it's going to be a fun year. :) Tonight she drew a picture of "the step-mother, Anastasia and Drizella" and another of Cinderella with most of the planets around her. Her own special spin on the fairy tale. Yeah. If she's not asking constant questions, she's singing made-up songs or racing around the house like crazy. It's a riot. Also, exhausting.

So, I was going to spend this past week after I turned in all my schoolwork doing some fun projects and none of that happened, thanks to my cold. However, last night I actually slept in my own bed the whole night through (instead of moving to the guest bed so I wouldn't wake up galagan with all the coughing in the middle of the night).

And now - it's time for everyone's favorite thing: holiday travel! I'm very hopeful that the snow will be over and cleared out of the way in time for an airplane to take off from Albany tomorrow at 10 a.m. Hopefully tomorrow won't be too much of a nightmare for us. Elena's getting better and better about travel, so I have my fingers crossed.

I should be packing - her school is closing early, so I have to pick her up in just a hour. Gah.

Elena is really into the planets right now (we have a good library book checked out now on the topic). Her favorites are Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, because they all have P's in them and that's her favorite letter now. (And yes, she knows Pluto is a dwarf planet, but she still likes it.)

She fell down the other day and her knee got a little scraped up through her tights. I commented on it being a bit red, and she said, "It's like Jupiter's Great Red Spot." We started laughing, but she didn't like that, and told us not to laugh at her. (Of course, we assured her that we weren't laughing at her.)

This morning, she seriously informed me that her Great Red Spot was feeling much better today.

Eeee!!! How does one NOT laugh????? :)

Everybody at story hour this morning was asking "how was your Thanksgiving? how was yours?" And my initial thought was, well that was *weeks* ago. Ahem. Perhaps not. I've been busy.... or preoccupied. Mostly with school. This is my last week of classes for my first quarter! I have a paper due on Sunday (a hypothetical grant report, which I'm not worried about at all. I've done plenty of grants in my lifetime), a final due Monday (take-home, open-book, etc. Mostly fill-in-the-blank, discussion type stuff, with a word limit, so they aren't expecting major novels written for each answer. I'm not too worried about it either), and a final project due Wednesday (as in, a week from tomorrow - an annotated bibliography about information seeking behavior of a particular user group chosen by moi). So since Thanksgiving I've really been working on the paper and the project, a bit nose-to-the-grindstone (the test was just given to us yesterday). I've even been dreaming about my schoolwork, which is a sure sign that my brain has been completely taken over.

Sunday we went for a *drive*. Gas prices are so low, it's reasonable to do that again! (Seriously, every time I pass a gas station and see those low low prices under $2, my brain shouts, "Dump the milk!! The cat's drinking unleaded from now on!!" Every. Time.) We drove up to Wilmington, which is a charming little ski-country Vermont town and had breakfast at one of our favorite spots (Dot's Restaurant - I had to-die-for Eggs Benedict) and wandered around. It's the kind of thing we used to do all the time, and just don't anymore - mostly because of gas prices. It was really nice. It started snowing a bit on the way home, though by the time we got home, it had turned to sleet. I was glad we were able to take advantage of the nice weather in the morning.

Otherwise.... apart from school work..... Elena's been jumping up and down on my last nerve today, as much as possible. She can still change moods in the blink of an eye, so she'll be just fine and asking questions and stuff, and then start yelling and whining about nothing in particular. Or go from whining and crying inconsolably to giggling and happy. It's hard to manage that, in terms of my own emotions. We're all tired today, which doesn't help. (She was up at 12:15 wanting water and at 3:20 because - so I'm told - her elbow itched.) But one of her best friends was at the library this morning, so she was happy there. And soon we get to go to *~*dance class*~*. And then I go to work.